


abash the little bird

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: A/B/O, Alpha Ben Solo, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Birdlo, Everybody makes wolves sexy why not BIRDS, F/M, Knotting, Mating, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Omega Rey, Pregnancy Scare, Raven Alpha Ben meets Mourning Dove Omega Rey in a bar, Smut, Weird Biology, What's Ben's Astrological sign?, a serious take on a really stupid crack-y premise, and one thing, based on a very silly morning on twitter, celestial magic, feathers - Freeform, he's progressively growing a tail until he attracts a mate, please do not apply science to this it's already taking fake wolf pack science for BIRDS, pornography for birds, very loose a/b/o mythology, weird fake ABO history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2019-09-17 09:03:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16971705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Ben Solo has a pretty easy time of fighting his Alpha instincts with the right cocktail of suppressants and bad attitude. However, some old wive's tales about the moon or the position of the stars may have knocked this mating cycle way out of wack for a lot of Alphas and Omegas; making them desperate to attract a mate.He may have had an easy time fighting his instincts before, but his body has other plans. Especially when it starts sprouting some truly impressive plumage to attract the right Omega.At least it catches Rey's eye.AKA Kylo gets a freakin' TAIL.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TourmalineGreen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/gifts).



> https://twitter.com/Trixie_Ren/status/1072903024501186561
> 
> "An ABO that takes its cues from birds where males have much more resplendent plumage to attract a suitable mate."
> 
> (This whole thread was gold).
> 
> This is so silly but I love it. Thanks to Trixie for coming up with this idea on twitter and letting me be a little shit in general. I figured I owed you for all the kindness you've given me in the past.

_“Nice tail.”_

 Self-conscious, he sweeps the royal-blue plumes off the floor of the bar behind him so she can step past. People have been tripping over it all night. 

But she’s just looking into the eyes at the centers of the feathers with a small smile. All he can see is her brown hair and the lashes of her eyes pressed to her cheek at her place behind his barstool.

“You here for a drink or to use that?”

Most mating seasons, the feathers amass on his neck and wrists, sometimes edging up his forearms and furling down his throat, blending into his hair. It's not ideal, mostly because Betas always have questions, but it's normal for his kind.

This season, he has an additional bird's tail, which isn’t unheard of for alphas whose bloodline is avian; but comes with the shaming stigma of  _compensating for something._

It was like seeing a matchmaker or buying a book in pick-up artistry.

It just looks desperate. And what else on his body could people look at.

In this society, any man with a tail like that needs to grow one to attract a mate because he can’t find one otherwise. The richer the colors, the longer the feathers, the deeper the need for intimacy.

He is just here for a drink tonight, tired of hiding in his apartment until the feathers shed, but maybe it’s because he has paid so little attention to his last few mating cycles that his body is growing mating signals for him.

She’s got a fine boned aura to her, light for flying, but she could also be feline and just looking for something to swat.

She settles on the empty stool next to him despite his apparent distrust, baring her wrist and the downy cream feathers that edge from under the heel of her hand. 

“I can’t stop singing lately, and I’ve never been fond of my voice before. Suddenly I’m harmonizing my troubles away and birds keep crashing into my windows trying to get into my apartment. There’s something about the moon this Spring. Or the sun, or maybe another star. Avians are over-producing hormones. It may be that the Winter is going to be bad this year.”

“Old wive’s tales,” he mumbles, but the way she selectively picks through the bowl of bar peanuts in front of her would make him believe it too. She's got feathers at her throat as well, under her ears. Speckled, light brown with dark spots.

She touches the feathers at his wrists. “So you _always_ grow these so thick?”

And _colorful?_  is the unspoken follow-up question. A little accusing. Teasing. 

He grumbles.

They’re usual inky black; maybe indigo. This year they are teal and royal blue. The tail can only be described as a peacock’s, and finding jeans that accommodate such a sizable plume out of his tailbone has been hard work. They exist, but it's a weird, rare time. He once saw a museum exhibit with Regency Era trousers cut to accommodate such a mating cycle; but for Avian Alphas it's been unheard of for centuries.

Jeans don't come cut like that. 

It’s been more inconvenient than anything else, not the sexual clearing house that everyone else seems to be experiencing by any stretch. Ben is waiting for it to die down.

But he can’t fight nature. No matter how hard he tries.

The feathers go up behind him like a shield; lifted and alert.

She snickers, but it’s not in a mean way.

“I mean, remember the Cat Summer a few years back? The cities were uninhabitable. All the yowling in the streets at night?”

She shakes her head, watching the filtered light hit his feathers, especially the fan of that erect tail. He knows why she can’t quite look away, and resentfully, he finds he can’t blame her. It is an impressive wingspan.

He doesn’t know what scents she’s blocking out with pills; but even with his heavy dosage this year he can’t really turn his attention away from her.

“I’m on suppressants,” he says quietly, sipping his drink. “Just trying to avoid any public yowling.”

She nods tentatively with a breathy little sigh.

She’s smelling him, he can tell.

Legs and hands folded primly.

She’s an Omega, clearly, and acting so soft for him. It pulls at his chest. He almost wishes he had the full faculties of his mating cycle, if she was so entirely aroused by it.

“I had an Omega friend who laid naked on the roof of her building that summer and took the first Alpha who made it up there at the smell of her.”

There’s a hungry glimmer in her eyes, as though such animalistic tendencies weren’t horrifying.

She trusts instincts; something he never does.

“What was the Alpha who claimed her like? When it was over, did they talk? How many felonies did he end up having?”

She smiles. “I was a bridesmaid at their wedding this October. Do you know what species you are?”

He hides his eyes.

“I’m supposed to be a raven. But then  _this_  happens, so anything’s possible.”

She laughs as he gestures at the peacock feathers behind him.

“They  _do_  get your attention,” she murmurs softly, sipping her drink with a dreamy expression.

“Aren’t you a sweet, demure little Omega.”

The words come out automatically, dare he say, instinctually.

They seem to make her melt for him. “I-I’m a mourning dove,” she swallows, seeming vulnerable to answer a question he didn’t return to her.

“How perfect,” he ruffles the feathers at her wrist, deciding he likes the trusting little bird, “how pretty. What’s your name?”

“Rey,” she says softly, feeling him strum his nails up and down the veins of her forearms.

His blood reacts to their touch; if he wasn't stuffed to the gills with suppressants he could not imagine how tonight would have gone.

She's trembling.

“You seem scared, Rey.”

She swallows. “I really wish you could understand how you smell to me right now.”

“I have a guess just from looking at you, Omega. Presenting yourself to me.”

“Yes, Alpha,” she murmurs, her face in one hand, her irises doing this dance with her pupils so the color keeps dilating out. 

“Ben.”

_“Yes,_  Ben. I couldn't stay away.”

He swallows, feeling his feathers at his neck and wrist prick up.

"Are you bold, or just needy?"

"I think right now, a little of both."

_Take care of your Omega. See what you're doing to her? Your poor bird is shaking._

"When is your heat?"

She closes her eyes and hisses, almost with fear.

_"Soon."_

Sometimes nature has an order to these things. He can't fight it. Not tonight.

“Should I skip a few doses of suppressants for you, my dove?”

“I think,” her eyes flicker to the tail-feathers looming behind his head, “I think you should listen to what your body is telling you and then give me a call.”


	2. Chapter 2

 He is going to find her.

It was almost like she posed this cosmic bargain to him at the bar that night;

_ If we meet again, it was meant to happen. _

“What was meant to happen?”

She smiled mysteriously, tugging her straw to the side of her mouth.

“Meeting again.”

He actually laughed, his voice cracking in disbelief, from her assured little declaration. Things meaning things. He is only devout in his nihilism, and yet the little bird beside him was so sure, so clear. 

He chewed his own straw instead of replying, pondering the entire concept of _meaning._

She was too coy to say destiny, or even fate on the night they met. But meaning...made for a calm sense of purpose, which she so clearly had. Sidling up to him, talking about his smell. Ruffling his feathers. 

He is going to find her, for whatever it means, because she calls to him.

The first thing he hears when he picks up the phone -at work, because he slipped the needy little thing a business card at the bar like a sociopath- is that she can’t sit still. He hears rustling from the speaker of the phone, not the room around it. 

Because she can’t hold it steady.

He can’t imagine how she got through to him from his secretary, who was smart enough to weed out what a strange call this was before it reached him.

And he hears her swallow, like her throat is swollen. And he hears her start to sing:

_ “You are my sunshine…” _

There’s a desperate murmur from her side of the phone. Her voice is so small and lyrical and bright.

She takes a shaky breath.

_ “My only sunshine…” _

“Rey?”

He is suddenly desperate, nose against the window of his office, looking down at the cityscape below. It’s early in the afternoon, too early, but he hears her singing for him like it’s all she can do at this point and he’s ready to drop everything.

It’s a rare day he braved it to the office; working from home with permission or exhausting sick and vacation days when it isn’t granted in order to avoid being seen in daylight with that fucking _tail._

Weekends he slung a flannel around his hips like he did in high school, so the length of it was buried under the tied shirt. Or he didn't go out at all. 

He does get loaded looks from the anxious way he tears out of his office; but Rey is singing on the phone, driving him into a frenzy so innocently, like she didn't even realize he almost came at his desk hearing her horny little body ache for him.

Hux was a cat Omega; he had nothing to put him in a position to judge Ben after that Cat Summer. At least Ben didn’t get an erection in the middle of a board meeting.

Ben shrugs on a trench coat, despite the heat, to cover most of the sweep of his tail. Just for the walk to...wherever he was going.

Rey is still singing, switching to humming when she can tell he’s getting to the elevator or otherwise distracted.

There are no other words.

_ “You’ll never know dear…” _

He feels blinded by the sound of her voice, dazed, wandering in the bright daylight helplessly. Until he finds his Omega. Until her heat surrounds him all molten-hot and wet.

His phone is still pressed to his ear. Rey can’t properly speak, which means she waited too long, played it too cool, to seek the help she would need later on before it got uncomfortable. He has to hurry to help her; his instincts making him frantic. He can’t smell her, but he can hear her song, and it’s like the suppressants don’t even matter. Other senses prevail. 

All of his feathers are standing on end, the many rows more of them he’d grown since meeting her at the bar.

_ “How much I…” _

The affection from such a perfect Omega nearly does him in. He can’t fight this instinct. 

“I’ll find you, Rey. I’ll take care of you.”

He hears her moan; but it rises in the scale of an aria. Then a sigh back down.

Rey could not speak to ask for help; she can only sing, but she did find a harmony that would carry her street address. 

“Don’t open the window for anyone,” he orders her. Thinking of the Cat Summer, her friend on the roof, and those pesky birds sailing into her windows at the sound of her song. 

She was his.

“Yes, Alpha,” she manages, her voice high.

"Sing for me," he orders, his throat dry and his breath hissing in and out of his nose. She does. 

And he stays on the phone as she knocks out three more heart-stopping renditions of  _ “You Are My Sunshine” _ that make it nearly impossible to walk with the erection she gives him.

He hops into a cab when even the trench he’s got on doesn’t seem to cover it anymore.

And he flies to her.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s got her hair up in a messy ponytail, just a loose tank top and panties on, when she unlatches the door for him. 

Appropriately dressed for her heat and nothing else. 

He is a man who likes his self control; and she’s going to be the undoing of all of that. 

Calling him to her apartment after one shared drink to handle...a sensitive time. Just her  _ smell _ is driving him wild, from the little of it he can process, the tail half-erected behind him. 

He sheds the trench coat first, so she can see the eyes on the feathers.

For some reason, he doesn’t mind showing her.

Maybe because of how she looks at him.

The apartment startles him. Bright and sunlit, with a cheery bay window in the living room, it does suit her in that way. Airy. Clear. Open. He can see why she’d like the place, why she’d be drawn to it. 

But it’s more hippie-ish than the woman he met at the bar in a blue cocktail dress; decked with astrological charts, candles, hanging beads, scarves, and feathers everywhere.

She hiccups when he steps into the living room, gesturing to her chest.

_ “You are my…” _

He moves towards her slowly, the fan of his tail whisking air past his ears. She swallows.

“Is that the  _ only _ song you know the words to?” 

First, obedient to him, she nods helplessly. Her thighs tense like she’s holding in her entire being from leaking out of her core, probably because of the slick that’s already down to her knees. Poor thing. Even modest sarcasm from the Alpha she has chosen brings tears to her eyes. 

And she just keeps hitting that same, soft note in a questioning tone:

_ “My...my...my...?” _

He cups her face. 

“I am  _ your _ Alpha,” he promises, kissing the gland on the side of her neck. She keens, standing on her tiptoes, trying to be good. “You are my…”

He almost blurts out  _ ‘sunshine’ _ and he knows it’s the endorphins of their complementary hormones; but it feels true.

“Omega, my beautiful Omega,” he praises, peeling her panties down her legs before bobbing back up halfway to kiss her. She stands there, woozy, until he helps her step out of them. 

“You were so brave, calling me here. Is it like this every heat?” he pinches the inside of her thigh,  _ “Hmm _ ? Are you  _ ever _ on suppressants?”

She hiccups again, her fingers weaving into his hair, kissing him hard. 

Her hazel eyes tell him she knew  _ he was, _ and that she was disappointed that he was, but she shook her head to answer his question.  

She didn’t strike him as the type, even if he viewed suppressants as the most logical thing known to man. Mostly because it kept him capable of being a man, and not an animal, but of course there’s that goddamn tail showing up anyway. 

Even without instincts, he felt out of control around her. If he had heard her song, unsuppressed,  _ at work _ ...there might have been some property damage. He doesn’t want her to know yet he has another dosage on him, but he might...not take it. Depending on how these few days go; he might slowly wake up under her spell and never go back.

So he’d like to feel in control now, to start.

“How long does your heat last?”

She holds up four shaking fingers, waggling her hand sideways a moment, and then five. 

He gets the gist of it.

“I’ll call in sick to work once we get a handle on things here,” he rubs a hand in a circle on her bare belly. Her uterus is hot and flushed, even though the skin, under his palm. She needs his seed. Her legs are shaking for it.

Poor little bird.

He tells her as much, crooning.

There’s an odd smell, because her pheromones are masked by something other than his suppressants, and he wrinkles his nose when he meets the flesh of her wrist with a questioning sniff.

Shame-faced, she points to a small bottle of essential oils on the kitchen counter. 

She really was one of  _ those. _

He tries not to tease her, because the look in her eyes can’t bear the mocking of her Alpha, not now, not before he takes her. But he can’t help it:

“How are those essential oils working for you?” 

He scoops them up. She whimpers, biting her lip. He knows it’s too much. She’s so close, close enough to get that head start, and it’s a desperate stage where if he felt what she felt; he’d be drowning and they would have fucked twice already since he came through the door.

He always thought he needed the suppressants. But he wonders how much  _ closer _ he would feel without them. 

Close to her, this foolish, optimistic little hippie with her oil-smeared wrists, seems like a good place to be.

“Lavender?” he purrs, but he sets the bottle down after anointing his thumb with it.

He dots her brow with it in a baptismal sweep. He leans back to check his work. As though she's done now.

She looks like she wants to  _ cry. _

“You’re better now?”

“A-alpha,” she murmurs, a question, her hands fisting in the hem of her tank top, like lifting the hem of it higher up her stomach will make him notice the pussy that was already bared to his eyes underneath. 

He does take pity. Shy little thing exposing herself. Waiting for him to take control.

He can’t deny instinct forever, and with that resignation he picks her up.

She snuggles in, pressing close.  His tail sweeps some magazines off the coffee table as he carries her off to her bedroom.

The bed is a mess.

Sheets rucked everywhere, coated in slick. He can tell she’s been waiting for him at that very spot, writhing in need. It’s her little nest.

He doesn’t bother with her tank top; it’s her heat, and she needs help, and she seems to believe they met for a reason. Maybe it was to get through this weird season for Avians. He can spare her the modesty until she can at least _speak_ again.

He lies himself between her shaking, spread legs, and she clings onto him as he tests the state of her slick. 

The state of the room, the sheets she’s kicked off the bed, reveals her impatience as much as the wetness coating his hand.

It paints a pretty picture as he slides himself into her. He holds her boneless thighs open and  _fucks._

Rey cries out as he pets her clit, trying to offer some relief other than slick that is close to boiling on her skin. She nods in approval at his slow descent inside. Heat or not, this is the first time they’ve had sex, and taking him to hilt leaves her trembling. 

Of course, it does seem appropriate for them, odd strangers, to have a first time in the form of some afternoon delight during the most biologically demanding time possible for her.

She is so wet, a burst of slick comes out when he nudges her entrance. It just keeps coming, coating his stomach, rolling down his thighs. 

He pulls her useless limbs until they wrap around him tight, and she fucks him back like an animal; frantic and flurrying and crying in his ear.

She stares at the feathers behind his back that cage her down to the mattress, fanned out above them to the point he has created a shady retreat on her sunny little bed. At home in her nest.

Her eyes lose focus, entranced by the colors that flash from his feathers. He knew before the... _ extra plumage _ had aroused her, but not like this. Her hands dig into the flesh of his ass, under where the feathers sprout just above his tailbone, and she shivers when he rubs his nose over a cream-colored tuft that has sprouted at her sternum, flurrying outwards to curve sweetly at the rise of her modest breasts.

_ “New?” _

He hadn’t noticed them the night they met; and they would have been clearly visible in what she was wearing.

She flushes, nodding at him, looking embarrassed. 

“Cute,” he praises, and she shuts her eyes and keens.

She drums her fingers over her lips before, once again-

_ “The other night dear, as I lay sleeping…” _

He holds her feathered wrists to the mattress and bears down hard enough to make her yelp.

“Sweet little Omega, I’m already here.”

She’s sobbing with relief, but the song still comes;  _ “I dreamt I held you in my arms.” _

It is then he realizes her song is her instinct to beg her Alpha for her pleasure. Not just a mating call. Just like his feathers caught her eye. Her song catches his ears until  _ he had to find her. _

_ “When I awoke dear, I was mistaken,” _ the words seem to make her mind fuzz in and out of the room as he thrusts. Her vision blurs. Tears leak out of the corners of her eyes. As though she’s imagining it is a dream, and he is not there.

“I’m here,” he soothes, cradling her to his chest as she cums at the promise, her body a limp ragdoll being bounced in his lap. “I wouldn’t leave my Omega, not when she needs me. Not when my little dove sings so pretty.”

She holds on for dear life as his knot fills her. She whimpers at the pleasure of the stretch; but it still is an unfamiliar, not-small-cock popping a knot with them joined. Locked now, she seems to be coming out of it as he is coming into her.

“Hey,” she murmurs against his chest as he cradles her, “sorry. I...I don’t know what came over me.”

They have some time before she works herself back up again in the next wave of painful heat. But for now, they’re not going anywhere while his knots keeps flowing, filling her, keeping her stuck tight. He likes this. Her in his lap, her limbs loose, her skin fevered and soft.

“Heat,” he says simply, because it’s true. He’s never fucked an Omega in heat, it’s too vulnerable, but he’s seen his share of Alpha porn, and it’s common knowledge how to tell when someone is faking heat. It is too intense to fake. He’s seen that state, lived through Cat Summers for all kinds and been hit with a waft of pheromones on days when his suppressants were wearing off, catching the eye of a blushing woman on the subway. 

Though the roles still feel reversed that he is assuring her that this is perfectly normal. 

He carefully, so not to disturb the flowing knot, touches the wall behind the bed that holds a large astrological map. It seems decorative, but she’s got...notes scribbled all over, noting the change in positions over the summer months, the stars and planets in alignment.

“You really...believe the old wives tales.”

And for the first time he gives her the credit that they may, with her confirmation, be warranted.

“We’re…” she hides her face in his neck, directly nosing his scent gland. She coos for a second before pulling herself away like she’s been burned. “Sorry. I know you’re more skeptical. I’m actually a...well, a spiritual consultant, so I’m more versed in…”

_ “Are you a psychic?” _

Rey blushes, but she can’t escape his eyes with his knot plugged in her pussy. She whimpers, embarrassed at his soft laughter.

“Astrologist,” she murmurs.  _ “Don’t laugh at me.” _

After she sang him such a pretty song, it does twist in his gut that his Omega is so hurt by his actions. 

He kisses her lips reassuringly. “You’re beautiful. I want to hear about you reading stars, my mourning dove. I’ll buy you a telescope and you can tell me anything you see in them.”

“I want my Alpha,” her eyes are huge, “to believe me.”

This is a huge, vulnerable declaration, and for a man who’s claimed horoscopes were bullshit for decades, he swallows that skepticism down. 

She is telling him the one condition she will not back down on, while seated on his knot for probably the next half hour. He nudges her cervix with it, raising his eyebrows, but she gives no sign but a slight wince that she can ever be argued with. 

“Did the stars tell you about me?” he says, his voice quiet and grave.

Rey shivers, biting her lip. 

She nods.

He doesn't know how to feel about that.

Trapped, or relieved. 

He presses kisses to those new, downy feathers on her breast. She whimpers, trying to push his lips away. Self-conscious.

“I have a tail, Birdie, do you really think you can blush over some on these pretty little tits? I like that they’re soft and sweet for me. They’ll molt off soon. It’s just a weird year. There's nothing wrong with you.”

Rey nods, like he’s said something deeply profound. 

“The stars told me a lot about this year,” she says gravely. 

He swallows.

Because those stars have conspired to tell her all of his secrets. He can tell. Things even he doesn't know yet.

She taps her thumb to his neck.

More specifically; his mating gland.

He can now tell this Omega knows a great deal more about these strange happenings than he could ever understand. 

He is grateful the suppressants numb the utter  _ need _ that courses through his body. It is the only thing keeping him in remaining himself.

 


	3. Chapter 3

He loses track of the days.

Isn’t that supposed to be what this was? Completely losing yourself in each other?

He pants, his tongue lapping at her mating gland; sucking what he cannot bite. His mouth is swollen because he’s been doing this for the entirety of the last knot. Each pulse of his cock forces a harsh, desperate suck, like he’s trying to leech her hormones out of her skin like mother’s milk. The constance of the gesture is strong between them. His lips feel bruised, and she’s finally stopped twitching like caught prey whenever he does this.

Instead, she lies limp and trusting under his lips, an ant under a magnifying glass who’s just happy for the warmth.

His knot pops a final spray of cum. She coos gratefully, wiggling her hips to feel the semen working to soothe her swollen uterus, her cervix clenching on the head of his knot.

Her eyes flickering trustingly up to his. Then at the eyes over his shoulders. Her pupils dilating. Hypnotized.

His body made these feathers for her. For her to want him inside her body. Without words, he feels a flush of pride over that goddamn _tail_ of all things.

And here comes the hard part. The thinking that comes back.

She had been trying to tell him something, days ago, hadn’t she?

Heat was a good distraction. Whenever they could build up a wall of calm for long enough to chat, it was on rudimentary things. Getting food. Resting. Keeping hydrated.

She had been trying to not-tell him something that first day by telling him it _badly,_ blatantly half-assing the information, but he’s still detached from those synapses.

Because the suppressants wore off.

Slowly at first. Like the chemicals were thinning to the point there were just pockets of clarity, bubbles in his bloodstream where it was clean and he was unaltered. He’d growl, rut into her desperately, and she would feel from the ferocity and the snap of his hips that they were truly alone together.

As one.

Then it would fuzz back into his clenching muscles. He had control of himself.

He needed to use it.

Now, the substance has thinned from his blood to the point of withdrawal. It might as well be gone. As is his control. Everything smells so different. He finally understands that night of the bar with her heady whine. Her trying to tell him that he’d understand if he had access to the senses that she did. Unsuppressed, it’s a nightmare and a dream at the same time. He completely lacks control, which horrifies him.

But it feels so good.

He’s fucking her, equally in a frenzy, because his body craves either his medicine or his biology. If he can’t have his suppressants, he needs her entirely.

Rey seems to like that.

He noses the feathers between her breasts; a soft, sweet little nest at the swells of her pretty tits. At some point in this process, when they had woken up in a pile of limbs from a sweaty, exhausted nap, her mound had sprouted a similar soft down.

Her body made these feathers for him.

He’d nuzzled his face into that too, before she was built up to the point of heat that she just couldn’t take teasing like that.

He could tell it embarrassed her a little, _Rey,_ believer in nature and stars and destiny, to have her body out of her control. As much as she pretended this was meant to be, how quickly they were slipping away from their humanity seemed to be affecting her as well.

Good. He couldn’t be alone in this.

It’s going to be weird to return to themselves. If he even remembers a self to return to, when this is over. If it can be over.

How do you get dressed and go through the day after this?

How do they go back to being strangers? When they know that doggy makes him go deepest. How abundantly clear that missionary is made for him to be her Alpha, growling in her ear, rutting like an animal? They can’t take back how well they both know that she likes the slippery control of cowgirl, but it’s awkward for him because his tail wants to spark and shudder behind him when it’s pinned down to the bed?

How when he sits up, frustrated, and shifts to bounce her in his lap instead, with his upright feathers hanging like a curtain between them and the rest of the world, they can look in each other’s eyes and see more than their Alpha, their Omega?

That they see so much more than what their role in this heat is?

In the afterglow, he brushes his fingers over the tattoo on her shoulder. A circle over the curve, a cap on it, a map littered with stars.

A few key constellations are marked, and from what she must know about stars; they have to mean something.

She tilts her head. Hair fuzzing out of the sloppy knot of hair at the top of her head. Sticking in her sweat.

“You like it? I got it recently.”

That’s been a theme from this Omega. Between rounds of maybe the most intense sex he’s ever had in his life, even just chemically, she simpers a little, grows shy. A lot of hand-fluttering and attempting to be hospitable, like her pussy is not the best host he’s ever had. Rey asks him if he likes everything: her feathers, her cunt, the look of her bedroom, the bottle of water with a rechargeable crystal inside that she gives him when he asks for a drink.

She wants to please him.

He says yes, even to the stupid crystal water bottle. It’s “recharged” by moonlight and he nods when she tells him like encouraging a cat with a dead mouse dropped at his feet. He lets her anoint him with "energizing" essential oils between satisfying her instincts like she's re-wrapping the wound of her warrior lover, so tender and eager.

Because he likes her.

He noses the inked skin.

“Yes, my little dove.”

So much.

She coos again, nesting into the sheets for what is hopefully a brief opportunity to rest.

“What do the stars mean, Omega?”

Her eyes shoot wide open. She looks up at him, guilt written all over her face.

“I don’t want to tell you.”

Heat loosens her tongue. It makes her obedient and eager to please.

Such a rejection is the most telling thing in the world.

“Omega…” he warns, tracing his fingers up and down her flushed thigh, slung up over his hip as though he needed help keeping his knot locked inside.

“You’ll...” those pretty eyes are wide, tears spilling across her freckled cheeks. “Alpha, please. Please.”

He shifts closer, confused by her reaction. Their bare skin brushing together makes her sigh. Even if she still looks worried, her brow furrowed up at him.

Shouldn’t Rey be telling him that his Mercury was in retrograde and he needed to look within to find the answer, or whatever Astrologists were supposed to say?

“What’s wrong? Tell me about the stars.”

She blinks frantically, eyes spilling over. She shakes her head.

Disobeying him is killing her, he can feel from her muscles clenching desperately around his cock, unknotted, but still inside her. She whines in her throat. Begging him to please let her get away with not answering.

He wraps his fingers around her wrists and binds her that way to the mattress.  

He doesn’t know why he feels this way. Why he needs to expose the feelings he senses from her.

He has to. He’s unsuppressed.

“You don’t even _believe_ in these things,” she tries to writhe out of his pinning hands. Biologically linked, his cock hardens inside her as though to reassure their bond. It seems impossible, like a tide reversing for a moon that is waning. She’s still in an refractory period of her heat, she doesn’t need him to be hard yet-

But he’s filling her with a smooth glide into her cunt, and she’s choking on her words.

“Then tell me. I won’t believe them.”

She whimpers, hiccuping, _“You are my-”_

Her eyes flutter shut in nothing shy of pure pleasure. Not a mating bond.

This feels strange. Not a call-and-response. Just pleasure for pleasure’s sake; something they have not yet taken from each other during her heat.

 _“Sunshine,”_ she sings weakly, her voice raspy. It’s more of a sigh.

“Birdie,” he responds humorlessly, like he’s greeting a coworker solely by name in the elevator.

He’s woken up to that fucking song so many times in the past few days. When they pass out against each other and she sings him awake as the warm, tingling feeling comes back between her legs. It’s their mating call, and maybe something more, because he does get the first twitch of hardness he needs to fill her up at the sound.

And Sunshine seems to be, in the moments that she’s capable of irony, a sort of joking nickname for him.

Rey shakes her head. Hair curling wildly on the pillow.

He wraps a hand around her throat.

She clenches down on his cock harder than his fingers do her neck. He’s not squeezing in the slightest. Just reminding her who has the power here.

Her lids flutter.

“Poor little bird. Clearly you can’t tell me. Should I get you someone else? Is there some Beta running round outside, needing to hear your song? I’ll leave a window open-”

The threat of leaving has her whimpering in pain.

He doesn’t want to be cruel to this sweet girl. But there’s someone else in him speaking, someone he can’t fight now that he’s been off his suppressants, now that something is making his body behave so strangely.

He clucks his tongue, a sound not unlike a chirp.

He rolls her roughly onto her belly to fill her up deeper. She keens as his thrusts pick back up with that same slow torture.

What if she went back into heat with him already inside? That slick pouring out just in time for an orgasm, she could start it by coming, and then he could keep working her until a knot rose.

“I would never,” Ben croons in her ear. “Never, my mourning dove, I’ll never leave you.”

She seizes underneath him, clutching the sheets to try to scramble away. He keeps a lazy hand around her neck while his hips pin her down.

“Please don’t say that,” she whines deep in her throat, “you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re only making this harder.”

He stops his thrusts.

“Rey.”

It’s clear he can’t make this into a game. She doesn’t want to play.

This isn’t _fun_ for her.

Her naked shoulders tremble underneath him. He kisses her mating gland. Practically candy to him, this part of her body, he sucks until she shivers.

He can’t stop, now that he has unrestricted senses.

But it’s the wrong place. She flinches as if burned.

He lifts his mouth, concerned.

They both watch her little hands clench and unclench in the sheets.

Once her gland is left alone, she rests her temple to the bed. So he can see her face.

Surrendering as he picks up his thrusts. He uses his cock to tease the words out of her. 

And somehow it works. He's so rough she'll give him _anything._

“It’s this season,” she swallows, and his fingers feel it move down her throat. He thrusts casually, listening, like he can do both in a smug multi-task when she’s a mess trying to keep her words and her body in two different places.

He lets up.

Hard to believe.

"Okay..." he drawls. This season is weird. So she's marking it forever on her skin, for _what?_

She smacks her dry tongue. 

“More importantly, this star alignment. It’s for a reason. The feathers, the hormones, our instincts. Avians are responding so strongly because…”

Just her profile kills him. Her face crumples up and she shakes her head.

“Rey,” he pleads.

He doesn’t feel like a merciless, powerful Alpha. But he does feel biologically bound to make her feel better, to be with her, to please her.

“We’re all supposed to find our mates this year.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have art of this! My beautiful wife [ lilithsaur](https://twitter.com/lilithsaur) drew [this smutty goodness for my birthday!](https://twitter.com/lilithsaur/status/1098420209105416192)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wait until I try to explain historical persecution of A/B/O dynamics.
> 
>  
> 
> [But here, have a playlist!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7FO6jMMK0JBLO6vEJdUTzX)

Rey is twisting the hem of her tank top in her shaking hands.

She is also rubbing her impossibly wet, heat-drenched cunt against the length of his cock, whimpering anxiously, and looking down at him with the biggest eyes he’s ever seen.

He closes his.

She’s biting her lip and just grinding.

“Don’t leave.”

She said that after she told him; bursting into tears.

_I knew that if I told you you’d leave me._

He’s trying to get more information out of her. Facts instead of feelings. Fighting instincts. Clawing his way out of them.

But she, gentle, emotional thing that she is, just rubs and pleads. So warm and wet. His body deliriously needing to be back inside her.

_Don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave._

He lies completely flat on his back, too stunned to move.

“Hormones?” he coughs out.

“Mhmm,” she has clung to the obvious science of the matter. It’s what would make sense to him. It’s not every day he sprouts a fucking tail. Even now, under the tank top she had shrugged on to try and plead with him to stay in a more business-like manner, he can see the feathers that crown her apex. “We’re all changing because it’s supposed to mark some kind of existential shift. Our bodies are telling us something is wrong, or incomplete, and the universe is connecting us.”

Those came after he did to this impossibly strange apartment.

“You little Omega witch,” he marvels, glancing up at her face. It’s twisted up with need, but she doesn’t take him inside yet. As if the conditions have changed now that he knows, and she’s waiting until he accepts her again.

Because the subject of _mating_ is now on the table.

“I didn’t plan on it, you were just, you offered to see me through this heat,” she squints her eyes shut tight, as if a fresh wave of pain rolled through her. She bears down, needy, “and this one is worse than anything I’ve ever-”

He nods idly, running his palms up and down her splayed thighs.

“I’m sorry,” he coughs out, “but you don’t really believe that just because we grew some extra feathers you have to entrust _your life_ to me?”

Poor thing looks so _ready_ to.

She keens, her shoulders trembling, as her hips duel with her head. She mounts, grinding and needy, while her entire face has begun to contort with a sob.

“I know, I know, we shouldn’t. _Don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave.”_

He nudges the head of his cock to her entrance.

They really shouldn’t be doing this.

It’s not as though he’s prematurely biting her mark; mating them when she’s too needy and desperate to think about logistics. But it’s like having sex with someone who said ‘I love you’ without saying it back; it feels sour for both of them, each of them feeling cheated out of the emotional level they were prepared for.

But it is so much bigger than him and the chemicals in his brain when heats flares from her cunt in what will probably be the last throw before they’re sane again.

Getting though heat is something to cling to; for both of them.

She sinks down.

He grabs onto her and ruts until he loses himself.

 

* * *

 

 

The room they’re in comes back to him with the rise of the sun. From a first glance, it was pretentiously disheveled. But he wasn’t looking closely. His eyes glance on the beads hanging from the window and the too-many plants and all the crap she’s got on the shelves, and at first, he had written it off as intentional quirkiness.

“You’re the first guy I’ve slept with without asking for his astrological sign first,” she murmurs, drunk on pleasure, into the crook of his shoulder. "Though I have a few guesses..."

This is a little joke, a sweet and self-deprecating one, so why does nothing but pure _pride_ surge through him as he bounces her on his cock?

“Does it have to be the same...kind? For this to work?”

She was the matchmaker, the star reader. She might have some insight.

He's seen mismatched pairs before. Everyone will argue that it works their own way; same species, different, Alpha/Omega, two Betas, a house of all three. But it's the eternal debate that relationships have a formula instead of just entrusting your happiness on someone else's judgement for the rest of your life.

He nuzzles her fluffy sternum.

However, Cat Summers and Bird Seasons seem to imply they're supposed to all pair up like Noah's Ark. They used to burn mismatched pairs, the bible giving only hints for how this was to work and humans sorted through it as successfully as they ever did with that text:

_If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them._

They were all animals, and all human, so in many cultures the mark of abomination was straying from one's own. So there were hundreds of plays about wolves and swans that were tragically fused by a scent they had to follow to their deaths.

He should feel relieved; they're both avian. He shouldn't feel relieved; mismatched pairs were legalized in all 50 states in the 1960's so there wasn't a problem to begin with. He shouldn't be thinking about it at all; no one was put to death over the offense of a snake and a lion together since the middle ages.

But a man like him touching a Beta could have gotten him beaten in a public square in Victorian London. For touching an unclaimed Omega, stoned to death in seventeenth century Rome. This is why he didn't like exploring the history of it.

History was horrifying. 

From Rey, he only wants to know the universe's thoughts on the pairs it makes. Can it work, he asks her, the universe, and she answers: through layers of translation he can only respond by wondering if he can believe her answer at all.

She combs her fingers into his hair thoughtfully.

“I don’t think it has to be,” she looks out at the sunny sky, “I think anything is possible. But the seasons have been pushing certain types to keep to their own. Would you rather have a cat, or a sea lion, than another bird?”

He huffs and shakes his head as she ruffles his hair playfully.

“Cats are all taken anyway,” she muses with a soft laugh. Her eyes are dreamily set on his stupid tail. “They had their season.”

He shudders over her. Is he inside her, or are they merely cuddling between heats? Sensation has melted into a pure, distilled desire for closeness.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

“A mourning dove and a raven,” she muses, her brow cuddled into his neck. Omegas in heat were just like this. She couldn’t control it if she tried; he couldn’t ask her to. “That’s kind of cute.”

"You see the future," he grumbles into her skin, eyes closed, "so you'd know."

She shakes her head. They're falling asleep against each other. 

"I don't seen the future, my raven. I just see what the stars tell me."

He thinks of the cats he’s known in her periphery: there was the obvious yowling and fucking phase of their summer, but the follow up was full of recent marriages and babies. He had a coworker, a Beta living with an Alpha, get up and left because his wife found someone while walking her children through the park.

The end of the marriage had been decided by a scent.

He didn’t want to blame it on something as simple as what they were; their nature.

He examines her room instead of thinking too hard about it.

Closer up; the little stuffed aviator doll is worn and well-loved. The plants are placed clumsily for the maximum amount of sunlight to it them. There is a deliberateness to placement of all the objects that he begins to feel through her when she follows his eyes and then relaxes; as if everything is in its place, where it should be.

It is her nest.

And he feels at home in it.

 

* * *

 

 

Rey has taken his jacket. The long trench he wore to work several days ago to cover his tail. A petulant, precious move to get him to stay.

She’s naked underneath, her strong thighs tense as she crosses it over herself like a robe.

He doesn’t exactly need it to leave, but it is a security blanket. He’s no desperate enough to stay without it, but enough to beg for it before he does leave.

He’s, frankly, overblown. She took his trenchcoat while he used her shower.

The distance is deliberate between them both.

He smells like her shampoo. He’s unsuppressed, she’s over her heat, but he now smells _everything_ in her. His instincts are so sharp that he feels lumbering and hopeless; trapped in a body to weak to process it all.

_Your Omega wants to wear your clothes._

It used to be easier to ignore that voice. Now it's all he has.

The world is upside down.

She chews her fingernails. It bothers him, but if he tells her to stop, she’ll obey. And that just means he’s accepting this.

“I said _meet_ them, I didn’t say _we_ had to mate.”

Her eyes are fluttering with heavy, distraught lids. There are tears that are definitely not old staining her cheeks.

“I hear you,” he pulls on his undershirt. He came from work. It feels weird to put a suit back on after it’s been abandoned on the floor for days. “But you could meet anybody, you know? Some guy could grab you back by the collar on the subway platform tomorrow to save you from getting crushed by a train. Just because we met-”

“I just believe that we met for a reason. I’m done with _waiting_ to see who’s next. It’s already happened. Shouldn’t we try to see what it means?” her eyes cloud, “I just...there’s just so much waiting when you get messages like this. I just thought...take control of your destiny.”

“I…”

She’s backing up into her kitchen. Her stomach roars; pointed and angry after days of sex and few breaks to eat.

He wants to feed her.

Something deflates in him when he recognizes the instinct that demands that be his job now.

She’s already ripping open a granola bar with irritated, jerky movements. She picks it apart into tiny pieces, one by one, and shoves them into her mouth instead of just biting into it like a human.

Taking care of herself.

She doesn’t look at him as he tries to gather the words to say.

“I knew you’d leave.”

There is a science to heat aftercare; and now, in his ignorance, he knows whatever he thoughtlessly poured into the test tube is going to explode.

It’s like normal aftercare, the same golden rule, _don’t let this person who revealed so much to you think that you don’t give a shit about them._

‘Aftercare’ always felt like, to Ben, a fancy word for just not being a horrible person.

He should have stayed in bed and cuddled her weakened, vulnerable body. He should have brought her food and kissed her after-glow-ing skin and asked her about her life.

He should have been a good Alpha.

Maybe he needs it now, the fancy term, to tell him to not be a horrible person to this Omega. The one that approached him, that chose him, that called him for help.

The one who needs him.

“I knew that you’d leave,” she closes her eyes.

“You don’t know that,” he swallows, “I’m a stranger to you.”

He has been in her bed nearly a week; he is mad to call himself her stranger.

She shoves her fists in the pockets of his coat. Her bare feet shift on the dusty wood floor.

“I’m not saying I already know you,” she mumbles pathetically.

She’s a tough bird. He knew that about her immediately. This isn’t just, it’s clearly not just _disappointment_ to her _._

Ben is doing something crushing, in leaving her.

She licks her pretty lips. “What I _am_ saying is the chance to get to know you means a great deal to me.”

Something ruptures inside of him.

He’s fucked up. He’s fucked up and he’s burned himself on his own mistake like his misplaced hand on a hot stove.

Ben wants to fix it. It is making his muscles coil; the desire to fix it.

But he had decided to leave, and like she couldn’t take back her hope that they would be mates, he can’t take back the fatal blow that he was too scared to stay.

She’s dropping his coat from her body. It pools lifelessly around her feet.

She’s not Rey in heat, his mourning dove, his little bird. Not anymore. She was a girl in a bar with an itch she needed scratching and an eternal optimism that makes his blood boil.

He grunts in the back of his throat at the sight of her naked in the middle of her kitchen. Removed from his jacket.

“Your wait,” he looks her dead in the eyes. He’s surrounded by her. Her warmth. Her smell, “will give you _everything_ someday. Something even better than what I can give.”

He does not see stars; but he can divine this for her from something so deep in himself it scares him.

She looks at him like a girl who is far too sick of hearing someday.

A girl who divines in _somedays_ ripped straight from the stars.

Even prediction cannot grant patience.

“I know you’ve been...suppressed. And that this is new for you. I just never felt, even in compatible Alphas, this connection before you. Like I wasn’t alone.”

She's asking him to try.

He just feels so dizzy, purposeless, and falters instead. Can't he just be normal? Can't destiny rear its ugly head on the fifth date?

She pulls away and fills a glass of water. Comfortably naked, even with her new plumage, where he always cowers in shame to hide all these new developments on his body.

It’s who he is; the inability to slow without stopping. This was good. It was really good. He was off suppressants for the first time since puberty up against a girl who had probably never taken them in her life. Who embraces being a soul amongst a cluster of stars that chose for her.

"You're not alone-" he starts, but she shakes her head.

He is...just trying to figure out who is now that there was all _this._

Why does it feel like she’s hurting him, when he’s doing the leaving?

“Goodbye, sunshine,” she whispers softly.

Because when he’s stumbling out of the apartment, she’s shutting the door.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, did I get a lot of loaded historical contexts into this smutty A/B/O fic.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, I know pregnancy is triggering for some readers, and the scare in this chapter does not yield an actual pregnancy. There is, however, some imagery in a scene that would mirror this universe's equivalent of taking a pregnancy test; so if that's a hard or soft limit as a reader, you might want to proceed with caution.

Ben always knew who he was when he was on his suppressants. They made it so it wasn't that hard.

The family doctor was private. Leia had always warned him, when she found the pills in his underwear drawer, that taking suppressants through puberty shut down a lot of the brain's ability to learn to cope with instincts, that it was better to decide what to pick and choose about being an Alpha once you knew the full depth of experience. But he didn't listen. He had never skipped a dose until he met Rey. 

This was the person he knew. It made sense. It cleared out unnecessary biological clutter. He could focus. He didn’t think he was anyone different when he was on them.

Now he feels completely foreign in his own mind. His nose burns with scents. A soft, goose-like Omega on his train car has him stumbling out like some threw a smoke bomb through the closing doors. Public spaces are a minefield.

No one he’s seen has a tail like his, not in person, but there’s feathers all over the ground of the sidewalk outside.

 _“You Avians are acting like the world is going to end,”_ a Beta on a morning talk show mocks a Bluejay Omega with a newly formed bird-claw-hand he was interviewing about this season’s apocalyptic-seeming imbalance of hormones, _“just get a couple of suppressants and stop whining about it.”_

He had been on suppressants since he was fifteen, he thought bitterly as he changed the channel, and there was no stopping this.

At a certain point there was no fighting nature anymore.

Ben had actually planned on taking them back up that morning, but the hateful tone in the Beta’s voice makes him recoil from the thought.

Suppressants...were less complicated. Because you saw the world like a Beta.

Living unsuppressed was a rarer perspective, scary, isolating. A free fall through your own base impulses.

He thinks instantly of Rey. She lived so freely as an Omega. Presenting. Flirting. Unashamed when he got that first, unfiltered whiff of her essence.

How it was the first time he felt like he knew who he was.

He gets home from work, a hellish day only remedied by taping up a picture of Hux and his cat-season whiskers to the break room fridge, and is close to just curling up in bed until the predicted molt happens.

He hears the poppy newscaster voice from this morning echo through his empty apartment.

_“Experts have released a statement that mated pairs are experiencing the molt at an accelerated rate compared to unmated avians, so ‘tis the season to partner up.”_

As if it was that easy. It didn’t make _sense_ to do that.

He imagined himself trying to reason with himself if he had marked Rey during her heat, sitting on her couch, both of them parsing out the details of their lives they had skipped because they like how the other person smelled.

It didn’t matter that he had to burn the clothes he had worn to her apartment because every time he caught the scents in the last few days he almost had a panic attack with the emotions wrung out of him over _leaving his omega._

No, he can’t live like this. He won’t. He feels too much.

He doesn’t want to imagine that, already deprived of her, he is _missing_ her; her soft laugh, her sincerity, her insane apartment. That the window-lined room that they had sex in let in so much sun and heat that he just feels cold in the night and shadow of his own place.

Ben felt warmer naked in her sunshine then covered in a million layers alone.

He paces his empty room with a mania that has been yet unrivaled in his years on earth so far.

And he pauses at the window at _the biggest moon he has even seen_ lurking above his neighboring buildings.

He’s not the most impressed by things like that, so it must be extraordinary if he literally stops short at the sight of it.

And then the power goes out.

He sees it fall to sudden darkness in other windows before he realizes he too is entrenched in the dark.

In the distance, in the city street, he hears one caw through the night, like a crow.

Then his phone rings.

He knows who it is. Ten minutes ago he would have let it go to voicemail. Instead, he answers.

“Ben?”

She sounds petrified. Maybe it’s a lingering Omega instinct, to need help feeling safe in the dark.

He swallows.

“It’s alright, Rey.”

“No, Ben...something happened.”

He goes back to pacing, his uneasy eyes still on that crazy moon.

“It looks like a city-wide power outage. I’m in it too. It’ll go back to normal soon, Birdie.”

“No, it’s not that. Ben...there’s an egg.”

 

* * *

 

 

She stands on tiptoe and helps him out of his leather jacket to hang it up properly like a 1950’s housewife. The apartment is lit with candles, smells of incense, and has almost a romantic quality to the light and warmth.

If she wasn’t so sick-looking, he’d assume it was an attempt to seduce him.

“Did it...hurt?”

She shook her head, walking bare-footed into her kitchen, where a small box clearly contained the source of her distress. He peered in curiously. It was not chicken-sized, nor was it human-baby sized.

It was a weird in between. Snuggled in tea towels and making his heart pound by being the most smooth, perfect thing he has ever seen.

“I’m on birth control,” she swears, looking nauseous. “I just felt so sick today, and I took a bath to try and soothe the cramping and-it just- _came out?”_

“Did it hurt, little dove?” he repeats, suddenly terrified at the sight of her laying it alone. How scary that must have been.

“No,” she admits, “it was so easy....like my body wanted it to happen?”

He nods, crouching to look at the shell.

“Do you have any idea…?”

“No,” She swallows, “Ben, I don’t know what to do. I thought I should keep it warm, but I didn’t-”

He examines her nest to offer her his approval. She’s begging for it. His heart skips a beat when he sees a little chunk of amethyst healing crystal amongst the towels.

Her frantic explanations get more anxious until he takes her hand and squeezes.

“It’s alright,” he gains confidence, staring at the egg, “you did everything right. The nest was smart.”

“Fuck,” she covers her face with her free hand and doesn’t let go of the one holding on. It’s like she can finally look away from it when he’s got eyes on it for her. He sees exhaustion pass over her body.

You’re not alone,” he adds, squeezing her hand.

She drops her hold on him.

“You _left.”_

Her voice is distraught.

He’s fucked up. He’s really fucked up. He left her the second her heat was done and she had to face not just the vulnerability but also his rejection alone. He was a terrible Alpha. Just like he wanted to be. A terrible Alpha was practically a Beta.

Staring at the egg, it’s the first time he realizes he is not normal, he is not a Beta; he is just a really terrible Alpha.

"I'm sorry."

He winds an arm around her shoulders and pulls her to his chest. She snuggles there automatically, her heavy-lashed eyes fluttering shut.

“We were supposed to meet, Rey. If this isn’t the biggest fucking sign in the universe...I’d be an idiot not to believe it. Just...be patient with me? Give me time to figure this all out? I'm not good at this.”

“I’ll help you, if you want?”

He presses a kiss to the top of her head. She smells so good to him, he can’t help but coil her protectively in his arms and nuzzle against the soft bun on the crown of her head.

“Please help me, Rey.”

“I wanted to stay mad at you, Sunshine,” she half-laughs. “I ought to peck you apart.”

The egg trembles in the towel-nest and they both go completely still. The shell cracks. He rubs a circle on her back when he sees she is not breathing.

He finally lets go and surrenders to the will of the universe.

A portion of the shell flakes away. He expects a sluice of amniotic fluid, or a beak, or a baby’s cry.

But the egg is entirely empty. It’s just a hollow shell.

Rey takes a deep, relieved breath.

“I... _fucking great._ Phantom bird pregnancy. _This season.”_

He can’t believe he went from terrified to disappointed.

She looks up at him, her eyes soft.

“Suddenly you’re ready?”

Her tone is only slightly smug, but very forgiving. Maybe more than he deserves. 

He bows his own head, hair covering his face. His feathers prickle up like there’s a change in the wind. Why is he embarrassed to be feeling when poor Rey had to swallow her pride and call the guy who abandoned her about an unplanned egg slipping out of her this evening?

But it’s in him now. Irreversibly. He wants to mate with her. He wants babies with her. Maybe minus the egg.

He is ruined for anything less than her life and his being cosmically linked.

What if she wants to just figure thing out? Is she doesn’t want the same?

She tightens her arms around him.

“Hey.”

He glances shyly at her. She strokes his feathered arm. She pets him from his spine to his flattened tail.

His mourning dove smiles at him.

“Does this still feel right?”

“Yes,” he answers honestly, his throat dry, “you do.”

“All this talk about moving too fast and then you make me _lay an egg,”_ she is still shaking with relief. The egg sits empty in the box, and looking at the hollow shell does make him see sense of how crazy this is.

He feels too much. He pulls her hair out of the bun on the top of her head and just _smells._ Nuzzling into the loose strands. She is his nest. She’s home.

They can figure the rest out later.

She lets him, obedient when his hands get greedy.

“There’s a kind-of-crappy diner down the street that’s open late,” she proposes gently, “you want to grab a cup of coffee?”

He nods into her shoulder, pliant and agreeable to just about everything she has to offer, and she laughs at his half-listening when he’s so grabby and greedy to her body. His lips trail across the start chart tattoo. This is what brought them together. It is too crazy to believe anything else.

She unknots the flannel he hastily tied around his waist to his most of the sweep of the tail. It’s a little too _Nirvana_ for him normally, but the trench coat wasn’t really him either. All sartorial choices this season were made around the tail. Hiding himself.

The feathers now fan behind his shoulders. Erect. Proud.

She has a woozy, love-sick look at them.

“Like this,” she insists, dropping the shirt to the floor, “I want everyone to see how you got me, Sunshine.”

Reality sets in. 

"The power's still out," he remembers.

Rey is unfazed. 

"Maybe it'll be back by morning," she hints in her soft voice, and he's already ready and hard for what she has planned in the meantime. "Great pancakes. Better waffles."

"Have you..." he smiles down at her in the candlelight, "have you _seen_ the moon tonight?

 

* * *

 

 

_“Ben?”_

Her voice is a song. He can hear it before he reaches the bedroom, but it doesn’t soften the way his jaw drops when he enters a space that has flipped since the last time he was inside it.

He purses his lips; a smile would be all too telling.

“Birdie, you _decorated.”_

Her knees dig into the mattress.

After a year together he knows fully well that Rey does not respond well to neutral statements during her heats. She’s _just_ on the brink enough to be able to take this without anxious fluttering, but the nothingness of the appraisal is going to drive her nuts. He has to praise, he's _supposed_ to praise now, and criticism is the furthest thing from his mind when she's so eager like this. 

But he's still not the best Alpha. She doesn't mind.

And she’s got the shed peacock feathers from last year in her hands, twisting, teasing, and caressing her skin like the tail of a very pleased cat. Her pinched-together fingers create a snug tunnel that she slides the length and the feather through from the tip, making it twist across her skin like silk fine enough to pass through the eye of a needle.

This is all that remains from _the tail._

He thought she was crazy when, in the winter, and they _all_ molted, she had suggested they keep them. He was fine going back to being a raven. A Raven newly mated to a Mourning Dove.

She left them, the longest, most colorful of his plumage, in a vase by her bed, but it wasn’t until one night he felt a distinct tickle on his nipple did he learn for sure why.

His little dove, the minx.

But that vase and that bed sat on opposite an wall now than they had this morning. She'd rearranged _all of the furniture,_ it feels like walking on Mars. Her bed is no longer right at the window, but at the wall across from it. It’s not an aviary, but snugger, comfier.

Nesting, it’s very important, it feels like she has control of the upcoming days before she completely rescinds it to her alpha.

Her mate.

Lingerie is too superficially _human_ for heats; it gets torn, heat is not about being posed and pretty, hormones make it too hard to appreciate.

But she did compromise tonight with a pair of thigh-high stocking that hold up without a belt or clips. They won’t be in the way -they still won’t survive his hands- but the effort is there on her otherwise naked body.

And makes her little feather-dance all the more appealing. The bed against the wall is a stage, and she’s his little burlesque performer.

He kneels at the floor at the foot of the bed.

“Do you miss it?”

They had gotten a lot of mileage out of his tail. She’d cuddle him, the feathers crushed between her chest and his back, like she wanted to feel the sensation.

“It’s once in a lifetime,” she insisted when he tried to pry her searching fingers away from the feathers, “don’t you know we’re at the center of a cosmos that has never been replicated?”

There is _nothing_ like this. 

Her nipple peeks out from the swipe of a feather. The ones his body grew to find her. 

"Miss what?" she smiles down at him, "I've got all I need right here."

Rey has been very bad at not being smug that she always knew this was meant to happen, long before he did. He doesn't care if her favorite phrase is _I told you so._

He wouldn't out his life in her hands for anything less. 

He dips his hand into the vase of shed plumage, selecting a firm, solid black raven feather, and tucks it between her legs to tickle her until she can't take the teasing anymore jumps into his arms. He kisses her bite-mark as he lays her back to see her through this heat. A proud Alpha.

It was not accident. Nothing was an accident. 

That stupid fucking tail was to find his mate. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please talk me down from what is obviously my lowest point.
> 
> Title is by Emily Dickinson.
> 
> Am I ready for tail!sex? I don't know. I don't know.


End file.
